"Newbie Farming" is the technique of setting up as many games as possible (either by starting or joining them) with New Recruits to gain easy points by taking advantage of difficult game options and the fact the New Recruits are more likely to deadbeat. Some players have been farming extensively - even sending hundreds of PMs to the latest members to get them into their games.

This is a gross abuse of the game. It gives the New Recruit "victims" a poor first experience and reduces the chances of them sticking around. As farmers move up the scoreboard it also harms the competitive nature of Conquer Club - the scoreboard is meant to measure skill in the game, not "harvesting" techniques.

In accordance with the desires and feedback of the majority of the community, our rules and as a new leaf for 2009, it is our New Years resolution to make Newbie Farming forbidden. Members who continue this practice will receive point resets and then progressively longer website bans.

This does not mean you will get in trouble for joining a game here and there with many new recruits. We are only talking about the systematic targeting of new recruits.

We have taken the following measures to stop Newbie Farming:

For New Recruits, we filtered out game options from the join page if they reduce the chance of new players reaching their 1st promotion (see herehere and here).

We shut down any usergroups with a focus on Newbie Farming.

We are sending individual warnings to the Farmers Guild and select other users who have practiced farming in the past. These should be arriving soon.

If you don't officially receive a warning, consider this it...we may have overlooked you once, but we won't do it again.

Totally agree with the spirit of the rule. However, the enforcement will be the challenge. To avoid subjective judgments, there should be some published standards as to what constitutes farming and what the resulting sanctions will be.

Phlaim wrote:Is "Map specializing"(for example most of King_herpes latest games) and "team-freestyle-farming"(for example: Game 3906454) a part of this?

team freestyle farming... i don't know why someone would start a team freestyle game on doodle earth ( or something similar) with unlimited forts... if they do then its their own fault... just my opinion

you cant just go and undo allmost all of this sites greats farmers farming is a part of the game if you admins dont like it you should have done something a long time ago now your just trying to piss people off oh well another f*ck up on you part well theres my $25 dollors worth please do not bitch at me for this mods

scottp wrote:Totally agree with the spirit of the rule. However, the enforcement will be the challenge. To avoid subjective judgments, there should be some published standards as to what constitutes farming and what the resulting sanctions will be.

Kudos on the concept, good luck with the implementation.

This is what I am worried about. I play a ton of games against cooks and new recruits etc, why not? It's fun. I actually seek out HIGH ranked players to try and get THEIR points. Is that "farming"? Heh what is up with this?

There are way too may over-ranked pussies out there in C.C. Land. Most of these gender-confused assholes play together on teams. Why? Because they can rely on most of these newbies to either deadbeat or fail, due to their lack of knowledge of the game they're playing.

Look at all the Doubles, Triples and so on games where you have all these high rank players, play on the same team, who prey on these newbies. Obviously, these sewer dwellers are more concerned about their precious points and won't RISK it by playing others of the same rank.

It's about time we either stop this practice OR find a new point system that hurt those who constantly play inexperienced players or teams.